All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Brazil confirms blood-transfusion Zika; PAHO calls for global support

Lisa Schnirring | News Editor | CIDRAP NewsFeb 04, 2016Also, Dallas officials issue a follow-up on a recent sexual transmission case, groups announce new research pushes, and Florida declares a public health emergency.<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2016/02/brazil-confirms-blood-transfusion-zika-paho-calls-global-support

Source: Brazil confirms blood-transfusion Zika; PAHO calls for global support

Silencing Freedom of Expression : Arresting A.Qassem is a crime

نادية حرحش

I have to say that I am still in a state of anger of what happened in the past day with the arrest of Prof. Abdel Sattar Qasem, the political analyst and lecturer from Najah University.

Qassem is one of the few Palestinian critical voices that are known with their transparency and patriotic views and position. He is direct and his articles have been along the years a breath of freedom of expression or the population. He says things as they are and seems fearless.

But.

As things are just going into deterioration beyond the current deterioration … things can only get worse.

As if it is not enough what people suffer each day from executions and oppression by the Israeli occupation. As if this cynical status of corruption and loss of direction on all levels within the Palestinian author that include political, governmental, economical, social and judicial levels. They…

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Racism and immigration in Britain

In February 1968 Enoch Powell attacked Kenyan Asians who held British passports and who therefore had the automatic right of entry into Britain. In less than three weeks Labour had responded by rushing through parliament a new immigration bill aimed at removing that right unless British passport holders had a close connection with Britain. In one single move Labour rendered 150,000 Kenyan Asians effectively ‘stateless’, whilst retaining a clause for those whose grandparents were born here (ie those who were white) to continue to enjoy free entry to the UK. Far from silencing the likes of Powell, Labour’s abject capitulation merely encouraged him. Within weeks of Labour rushing through its new act, Powell made his most inflammatory speech yet, predicting that ‘rivers of blood’ would flow if immigration was not curbed further.47 When the Labour government finally fell in 1970, its supporters demoralised and disillusioned, it left behind a legacy of racism more shameful than perhaps any other in its history.Despite Labour’s fairly transparent posturing in opposition, and its protests against the Tories’ 1971 Immigration Act, little changed when it next took office. When Labour won the 1974 election it moved very quickly to tighten the rules even further.48 It was under Labour, for instance, that gynaecological examinations of women were carried out at airports supposedly to determine their virginity, and it was during the 1974-79 Labour government that hazardous X-rays were taken at airports to determine the age of prospective entrants into Britain.49 Within two years of winning the election Labour also joined the racist agitation which surrounded the expulsion of a small number of Asians from Malawi, evidenced by Bob Mellish’s claim in 1974 that people ‘cannot come here just because they have a British passport–full stop’. By now this was abundantly clear for all to see, for removing the right of British passport holders to enter the UK had, after all, been the main point of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which Bob Mellish’s own party had forced through the Commons with obscene haste.In reality, the episode surrounding the expulsion of the Malawi Asians in 1974 was one of the clearest examples yet of the way in which racist agitation for immigration controls has virtually nothing at all to do with the actual numbers of immigrants who attempt to gain entry to Britain at any one time. Only 250 Malawi Asians were being expelled from Malawi and all could easily have been incorporated into the voucher system for that year. Even so right wing Tory MPs tabled motions demanding urgent discussion on the ‘changing demographic character of Great Britain’50 (meaning of course the colour of people’s skin) and Labour’s home secretary, Roy Jenkins, responded by assuring them that Labour would maintain ‘strict immigration control’ and would ‘root out’ illegal immigrants and overstayers.51 By 1978 Labour had buried its conscience for good, a fact demonstrated by Merlin Rees’s famous television admission that all immigration controls were aimed at stopping ‘coloured’ immigration.52 Of course Labour had always accepted this basic premise, which had been recommended by its own cabinet committees during the 1950s and which was institutionalised for the first time in the 1962 Act. The only difference now was that they were prepared to openly admit it.

Source: Racism and immigration in Britain